HP has announced five new services for optimizing and managing heterogeneous storage environments, along with enhancements to the company's Pay per Use solution for HP StorageWorks XP disk arrays, which allows customers to pay based on actual storage capacity usage.

"HP sees storage-related services as a key growth area in their overall services effort," says Doug Chandler, program director for Storage and Data Management Services at IDC. "Compaq had a pretty solid story to tell in this space before the merger, so that's something that HP picked up as part of the merger. Customers are looking to get the most out of the storage capacity they've already installed, so that's the focus of most of these services. And the data management and retention issue has become a hot one, due to the headlines about e-mail coming into play in several high-profile court cases, as well as regulations that specify how data, including e-mail, must be retained."

"These offerings help to round out HP's storage services portfolio," Chandler continues. "Nothing groundbreaking here, but these services address some key customer concerns pertaining to storage," such as business recovery and continuity, storage optimization, data management for e-mail archiving, and sanitization. The e-mail archiving service, relating to Legato software, was announced earlier in the month.

"Increasing agility and return on IT investment will continue to be critical business imperatives moving forward," states Gary Wright, vice president, network storage services, HP Services. "HP, with its Adaptive Enterprise Strategy, is strongly positioned to help companies create more business value with services such as these."

Storage has become "the heart of IT," adds Wright, "because it is very critical to IT infrastructure and the whole business."

Issues like return on investment, managing multi-vendor environments, and disaster recovery are driving the need for better storage management tools, according to Wright. And with more than 2,000 SANs implemented -- "more than anyone else" -- Wright says HP is positioned to deliver those services.

Wright claims companies using the new HP services report they have improved performance, for example, by 30%; reduced the need for storage administrators by more than 75%; and increased SLA delivery by 100%.